GOP Congressional Website Gets the Viagra Treatment

WASHINGTON, D.C.—We’re not sure if it was done to symbolically support May’s month-long celebration of masturbation, or simply to imply erectile dysfunction issues within the GOP, but somebody yesterday hacked an unsecured version of the website for the National Republican Congressional Committee, replacing the homepage with what appeared to be hundreds of links to boner drugs Viagra and Cialis.

BuzzFeed reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro first noticed the anomaly Sunday morning, though no one appears to have yet asked him what the hell he was doing there on a Sunday morning in the first place. At any rate, he tweeted his finding, complete with a screenshot (pictured). Someone must have then alerted the NRCC, whose web developer said that night via Twitter, “We’re working on it.” It was eventually fixed at around 10 a.m. this morning.

ADVERTISEMENT

Not everyone who visited the site saw the SEO-inspired links—i.e. "viagra no doctor canada"—which were only visible to people who went to “nrcc.org.” Typing “http://www.nrcc.org/” into the browser took surfers to the committee’s correct site. But the links didn't lead anywhere anyway.

According to the Washington Post, "None of the links work; they lead to 404 error pages hosted on cellscope.berkeley.edu, a Web site set up for a University of California-Berkeley project to turn a cellphone camera into a diagnostic-quality microscope."